The present invention relates generally to the field of online analytic processing of data and, in particular, to patent and web-related analytics tools and methodologies for assisting in the identification of potential licensee markets.
Modern business intelligence routinely makes extensive use of customer and technical data obtained from databases stored in data warehouses. Such business intelligence may typically be obtained by posing an analytical search and/or query to one or more associated relational databases. Intellectual property (IP) intelligence, in particular, may be critical to the competitive advantage of a business entity. The business entity may seek to maximize the value of its IP assets by investigating and identifying high-potential licensees for some or all of its IP assets, especially for its patents.
In the current state of the art, however, the process of identifying high-potential licensees can be time-consuming and ineffective. For example, taking the approach of selecting a group of “seed” patents and conducting a search via the Internet may require multiple labor-intensive and time-consuming sessions. Moreover, the search results may require further manual processing to yield understandable results, results that may or may not be of value to the interested business entity.
As can be seen, there is a need for better methodologies and tools dedicated to the identification of worthwhile licensee markets.